


King

by TheHangedMan



Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Sexual Language, Spoilers for end of 000, mutual dependency
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 01:33:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19074772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHangedMan/pseuds/TheHangedMan
Summary: Here at the end, Belial finally learned the purpose of his creation.





	King

“Singularity. You’ve already decided, haven’t you?”

The words still left an after taste on his tongue as he held out the fateful red string for the captain take.

She accepted it from him; shooting him a wary glance as his fingers purposefully brushed along the top of her hand. He flashed her a wicked grin, displaying a set of sharp white canines still tinted red with his own blood.

To her credit, the Singularity didn’t visibly react. Instead she simply nodded, curtly, ending their brief interaction without returning his smile. 

Once she had been so meek, so easily flustered by his depraved remarks and causal propositions. Now she stood tall and the air felt heavy with the powerful aura that surrounded her. 

She really had grown into quite the fearsome woman. 

What a waste. 

Even Sandalphon, with all his deliciously cutting words, did no more than spare him a final bitter backwards glance before the group of them departed. The Singularity really had made a man out of him; his narrow shoulders somehow seemed broader and his battered body carried a confidence only possible along side the acceptance of his divine purpose. He stalked away, trailing after the captain like a tamed mutt.

If things had turned out differently, he would have liked to take the pair of them for a ride together. What a show they would put on with bodies bared naked, their brows soaked in sweat, and their faces twisted in carnal delight. They would look irresistible on top of him, or underneath him, either way he didn’t mind. 

It was fitting that they two should die in such a way; blown out of the sky like a set of tragic shooting stars. How brightly they would burn as they fell past the sky to the cursed earth below! Maybe he would be lucky enough to bear witness to the show on his way out.

He had always been somewhat of a voyeurist. 

Still, it was such a lackluster death. It really didn’t do them credit. After all, they had been the only two able to withstand the might of a god. 

It was almost cruel.

The smile held on his face as he reveled quietly in the situational irony. He was used to this form of private enjoyment while concealing his schemes; such was the lonely fate of the fallen Primarch of Cunning. 

“We need to get a move on too. I’m pretty sure we don’t want to wind up in that dimensional rift.”

He stepped forward, in the direction of his creator, biting his tongue as the weight shifted onto his right leg. Raw agony lanced through his body; stemming from the wounds he no longer had the spare energy to heal. 

He knelt down in front of the Astral, inspecting his wounds with a critical eye. 

“Humph.”

Lucilius eyed him coldly from where he sat; battered from head to toe, in a pool of blood that was not his own. Well, at least not entirely. It seemed that neither of them was in any shape to be moving around right now. 

“Are you sulking? It’s a shame the plan didn’t work out, but we can always make a new one.”

Masking the urgency from his tone, he reached out a hand to help him to his feet. Maybe it would be possible to carry him to a nearby island with the final ounce of strength he had reminding in his core? If Lucilius had even just enough strength left to manifest one set of his twelve wings he could make it the rest of the way should he expire too soon. 

“You’re not fooling me. You don’t care at all that it failed.” 

Lucilius waved him off, pushing his outstretched hand away. 

“No, I mean it. Well It’s a shame, but it was still amusing.” 

He stumbled on his words for a moment before gaining his verbal footing once more. The movement had caught him off guard more than he would have like to admit. It wasn’t that he didn’t expect rough treatment from the Astral, that was nothing new. 

What surprised him was the blatant childishness of his creator’s reaction.

“Contradictions from you too…”

Lucilius hugged his knees to his chest and scowled. From his posture, it was clear that he had no intention of going anywhere any time soon. His creator had always had trouble finding a sense of urgency in regards to any matter that did not include the immediate chance to burn the heavens. It appeared that at this moment he was much more inclined to debate the motivation behind and the philosophy of creation’s actions.

Now, with the elliptical rift bearing down on them, it didn’t seem like the time or place for such a conversation. Still, what purpose did a creation exist to fulfill except to pleasure it’s creator?

The Astral had no desire to leave this place. Who was he to drag him out?

With a final resolute shake of his head, he sat, lowering himself into the filth beside Lucilius. Where their shoulders touched, he could feel the other man tremble, overflowing with a barely contained sensation or emotion. 

Pain?

Rage?

Grief?

Regret? 

No. It was none of those things. He had seen all those emotions on his face before. As beautiful as all those things were, this was something far more brilliant. It sharply contrasted those watered down feelings in comparison. 

What his creator felt was despair. 

Deep and dark. Nothing had plagued him ceaselessly, had assaulted him endlessly as his concern with his place amongst the stars. Now, he knew what role his loathsome creator had intended for him, and he couldn’t even exact his revenge for it. 

It was the same behavior he had condemned the Primarch’s spare for exhibiting nearly two thousand years prior. How little Sandy had fought to have his worth recognized in the eyes of his creator only to be scorned in return. We’re they all not just an angled set of mirrors reflecting back the same image at each other growing more and more warped as time went on?

Oh dear Cilius, the contradictions were not limited to just your most corrupted of creations.

He wrapped a bloodied arm around his creator’s waist, supporting his broken body against himself. When he didn’t pull away, Belial relaxed, turning his eyes back up towards the vibrant display cresting just outside the bounds of their heavenly tower. 

Well, he had wanted them to watch the end together. Although, at the time, he had not intended for that to mean their shared demise. 

“Love is a mass of contradictions, Cilius.” 

The words fell from his lips so freely along with an easy smile.

It wasn’t the first time he had said as much in their casual banter and, so long as they didn’t remain here, he didn’t plan on it being the last. Still, for one who lied so often that it was as natural as breathing, he wondered, could the truth ever be believed from him?

Lucilius shot him a dark look, his fair features contorting into an expression of spiteful condescension. 

“Love?”

He scoffed. His head turned and he locked eyes with him, studying his face. The expression he wore turned calculating as if he were trying to weed out the flaw in Belial’s corrupted system. Finally, and a low lifeless laugh broke the thin air between the two of them. 

“You Primals cannot comprehend love.”

Unable to help himself, he shivered under those icy blue eyes. 

“Mmm, maybe not.”

He leaned his head up against his creator’s shoulder, nuzzling his face into his neck in a way that was far more familiar than he had ever been allowed before. There was no point in arguing the finer details of his design. Emotions were just chemicals; attachments simply animalistic adaptations meant to increase survivability. It wasn’t impossible that they Primals had become a little more than the machines their creators had intended them to be.

Still, it was that outright denial of knowledge based on principality that made him so very human; so very flawed. Even the greatest mind that had graced the sky had his eyes closed to that which he did not want to see. 

“Have you ever wondered what purpose you were made to fulfill Primarch of Cunning?” 

Lucilius held still, stiff as a board under his tender embrace.

The question caught him off guard. 

“I have wondered… I suppose.”

He chose his words carefully, unsure of what direction the researcher planned to take with his words. Everything he said, he said for a purpose. 

Lucilius’ gaze drifted skyward and Belial’s eyes watched them float off into the darkened sky before them. His expression had steadily grown more and more numb as he accounted for all that he had lost that day. 

“Of everything I have ever created I believe you are the only one who has never asked one of the Astral researchers.”

Blinding light pierced through the transparent walls of the great tower. Beams refracted through its boundaries like a prism, throwing the colored light out in all other direction. At it source, a tear, in the form of a white void, threatened to swallow them whole. Closer they drifted. moving towards its center.

Still, the two of them sat, almost calmly, speaking of other things.

“I have always been content.” 

He breathed out eyes still fixed upon the illuminated features of the one he so cherished. It was the truth. Never before had he asked, because never before had his creator offered up the information to him.

“It doesn’t matter why I was created, I am a beast built to toil for your sake.”

Should the ever turning wheel of Lucilius’ design catch him underneath and he was trampled then so be it. 

The Astral’s gaze trained on the ever shifting point where darkness met light. He seemed to grow even more distant as he watched their inevitable doom grow closer.

“Unlike you, with Lucifer, I had intent when I set out to make him.”

Sharp jealousy stabbed into his heart as the name rang violently in his ears. 

Lucifer. It always came back to him didn’t it? Even at the end he spoke of him. By this point, he should have expected it.

“He needed to be flawless. I slaved day and night for months, no years planning out the finer details of his design. It wasn’t until I had perfected him down to the last molecular component that I even considered setting out the tools on my workbench.”

Lucilius sighed deeply and finally he relaxed slightly into Belial’s embrace.

“Still, my first attempt was a failure.” 

The way that Lucilius held himself starkly contrasted the hideous feeling that bubbled up in the pit of his stomach. His delicate fingers, no, Lucifer’s fingers, drummed against the floor absently as he drifted along the road of his recollection. 

It was pointless being envious of the physical union that now existed between their shared creator and his greatest creation. Lucifer was dead, he, Belial had won in the end. What place did an overwhelming emotion like this have while he was still living and breathing the air that the former Primarch could not?

Carefully, he guarded his expression against the feeling that rose like bile in his throat.

“It was with that failure I was forced to re examine my research. It was in this process that I realized the inherent imbalance that existed in the core’s design. Light could not be achieved without equal darkness to balance it. I could not create something from nothing.”

Either too callous to care for the sting that his words caused or determined to inflict upon others the hurt he had experience, Lucilius continued unphased. 

“Everything needs a lesser half; darkness to balance out the blinding light. I understand it so much more now than I did back then. If I was to create perfection, I also needed to make imperfection.”

With one of his violently trembling hands, he clutched his face, expression twisting further with his words.

“Without knowing it, all I was doing was mimicking my creator. As he made Helel and I, so too did I make Lucifer and you. You were a shadow, designed so that my greatest work would not be sullied with an ounce of your darkness.”

Lucilius’ eye flicked over to him with the energy of a dead man. 

“Well, do you hate me for it?”

Belial shook his head, “No.”

Lucilius grunted and turned back away. 

“I can’t imagine what it’s like to be so simple, so unconcerned with anything other than your immoral urges.”

Lucilius taunted him weakly, but it was clear that he had given up on getting a rise out of his creation. As his attention returned to the infinity before them, a private smile played on Belial’s lips.

How could he feel anger? 

Overwhelming joy filled his heart at the Astral’s words. Truly had one ever been as favorably chosen as he? For as Lucilius was the lesser half of Helel, the Eve to a unworthy Adam, so too had he been made to be a lesser half.

How could he be sad knowing that, like Lucifer, he too had been made faithfully in his creator’s image.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This was just a quick drabble I’ve been sitting on for a while that I finally cleaned up today because of a twitter conversation. I enjoy their complicated dynamic so much
> 
> @_Hanged_Man_ on twitter


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